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PostPosted: Thu Feb 22, 2007 8:15 am 
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Posts: 29
Hello all,

This is my original post: the latest info is at the end

So, the big question that I keep asking myself is: "Will I ever get KnoppMyth playing back video smoothly at 1080i?" I have wrestled with this for over one year and the only versions that I have had working acceptably are R5A30.2 and R5D1. I currently put in R5E50 and it totally hosed my system.

I thought since my system is essentially a Dragon it would work. The system is a NForce 4 motherboard with the NVidia 6150 integrated video, 1 GB of RAM, Athlon 64 3200+, Seagate 320GB HD, HD3000 tuner, output is to a component video HDTV that only does 1080i.

I have bought and put in a 6200TC card, turned off on-board video, and put in a Athlon64 X2 overclocked to 2.4 GHz and it still had visual artifacts on R5D1 that are not present on built-in tuners.

Does anyone know if KnoppMyth can playback 1080i smoothly with NO artifacts using a 6200TC or 6150 and Athlon64?

What has me dismayed that maybe this will never work. I don't understand since when using a 6200TC it should be the same as a Dragon box. Is it the motherboard at this point? Unfortunately, the 2 other people that I know with KnoppMyth are using 720p and say that it works flawlessly.

Many seem to think that XvMC is important, however, the text by the XvMC says that it doesn't work well for HDTV sized frames. I have noticed that there are different (and more annoying) artifacts when using XvMC than either Standard or libmpeg2. I also have the commercial removal turned off. Also with an Athlon64 which is better Standard or libmpeg2?

Thanks,
Rick Wirch

--------------------------------------------------------------------------
Latest info from November 2007
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Hi all,

I have upgraded to R5F27 and done all the tweaks listed in http://www.knoppmythwiki.org/index.php? ... imizeHowTo
.

Right now 720p stations like ABC and FOX play back flawlessly in 1080i, however 1080i stations like CBS and NBC have smooth audio with occasionally stuttering or jumpy video for a half second or so. Then the video is smooth until it stutters again.

I have also played with all the sync to Vertical Retrace options in both nvidia-settings and the myth settings.

I have found that libmpeg2 is the best playback option which is not what I expected. I expected XvMC to be the best option, but that one plays back the worst. Standard XvMC stutters audio and video even with 720p material.

Does anyone have a Athlon 64 3200+, NForce 4 chipset, 1 GB memory, 300G HD, and NVidia 6150 based motherboard working with 1080i output? This is SO close to the Dragon hardware that I can't believe that I can't get it to work.

Does anyone have any ideas?

HELP

Thanks,
Rick Wirch


Last edited by wirchrick on Mon Nov 12, 2007 8:49 am, edited 1 time in total.


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PostPosted: Thu Feb 22, 2007 8:24 am 
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Location: Virginia, USA
wirchrick wrote:
...output is to a component video HDTV that only does 1080i.


Have you ever tried a 540p modeline? Or, are you sure your current modeline is interlaced?

My KM backend is connected to an old HDTV which doesn't accept 720p, only 1080i. But I'm using an (approximately) 540p modeline and HDTV recordings look great through it (using XvMC as the backend is only a Athlon 2400+).

I think one of the issues with 1080i is confirming that the interlaced fields of the 1080i recording is in sync with the fields of the 1080i video card output to the TV. You can mask that with various deinterlacing modes, but then you're having to build 1080p frames and I imagine that could be memory-intensive.

Also, define "visual artifacts." When you say "non-smooth" that implies strobed motion or jerkiness in pans. But "visual artifacts" could mean something else...


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PostPosted: Thu Feb 22, 2007 10:50 am 
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ceenvee703 wrote:
wirchrick wrote:
...output is to a component video HDTV that only does 1080i.


Have you ever tried a 540p modeline? Or, are you sure your current modeline is interlaced?

I think one of the issues with 1080i is confirming that the interlaced fields of the 1080i recording is in sync with the fields of the 1080i video card output to the TV. You can mask that with various deinterlacing modes, but then you're having to build 1080p frames and I imagine that could be memory-intensive.

Also, define "visual artifacts." When you say "non-smooth" that implies strobed motion or jerkiness in pans. But "visual artifacts" could mean something else...


Yes, I have tried 540p modelines and could never get it to work.

The visual artifacts are jerkiness or tearing in pans or other large movements of the camera. The audio is fine, but there are visual artifacts. I have also tried all the possible options in the settings to no avail.

Someone suggested that I needed to have VSync and "Allow Hi-Priority Threads" checked, but when I do that the playback audio and video stutters.

I recently received a post from someone and it appears that the 9756 NVidia driver along with the R5E50 is the magic combination that works. Unfortunately R5E50 doesn't understand my network like R5D1 did and it is non-trivial to upgrade the NVidia driver.


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PostPosted: Thu Feb 22, 2007 1:52 pm 
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Location: Ft. Worth TX
This topic has been a matter of some curiousity to me too. I have had an HDTV setup running for long enough on a decent piece of equipment (3.2 ghz Pentium) to have observed some small faults related to equipment performance.

These consist of 'random pauses' (good search term for the threads thereon..) with momentary sound loss and frame drops on fast motion.

Rrdtools has been very enlightening. It shows, that (with commercial processing banished to overnight) The processor is hitting a max useage of 60%, isn't pegging and is unlikely the cause.

The thread about pauses explored 'DMA on' and the fact that file deletes would cause pauses 'on demand'. The fact is that 'DMA on' hard drives should handle several HD streams, but it's capacity is swamped during a file delete. Building on this, random pauses would seem to happen when 'random housekeeping' chores grab the drive and momentarily choke the HD stream. Anyone have any ideas on ways to supress 'random housekeeping' ?

The 'frame drops on fast motion thing' may be maxing out the video card (an FX5200) which has been said by some to not have enough 'horsepower' for 1080p HD video. I plan to try an FX6200 to see if that helps.


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PostPosted: Thu Feb 22, 2007 4:21 pm 
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Location: Bendigo, Victoria, Australia
wirchrick wrote:
I recently received a post from someone and it appears that the 9756 NVidia driver along with the R5E50 is the magic combination that works. Unfortunately R5E50 doesn't understand my network like R5D1 did and it is non-trivial to upgrade the NVidia driver.

There is supposed to be another KM release in a few weeks it may be worth waiting for that one.

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PostPosted: Thu Feb 22, 2007 4:28 pm 
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This will be great, in that it may allow HDTV to run on lower powered machines, But my issues would remain, overwhelming the hard drive capacity with 'other tasks' running, and overwhelming the video card.


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PostPosted: Thu Feb 22, 2007 7:19 pm 
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Location: Arlington, MA
Please don't "cross post" things in two different places. Cecil takes a really dim view of it. Since you're the only person who has posted in the other thread here http://mysettopbox.tv/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=14314 you can still clean this up yourself. Use the [X} in the upper right hand corner of your trailing post to remove it, then that will let you remove the head post.


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PostPosted: Thu Feb 22, 2007 7:36 pm 
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Posts: 905
Location: LA, CA
turpie wrote:
wirchrick wrote:
I recently received a post from someone and it appears that the 9756 NVidia driver along with the R5E50 is the magic combination that works. Unfortunately R5E50 doesn't understand my network like R5D1 did and it is non-trivial to upgrade the NVidia driver.

There is supposed to be another KM release in a few weeks it may be worth waiting for that one.


Really? This is great! (of course I won't hold you to this, but cool info)


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PostPosted: Fri Feb 23, 2007 9:05 am 
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Location: California
snaproll:

Quote:
The fact is that 'DMA on' hard drives should handle several HD streams, but it's capacity is swamped during a file delete.


I converted my /myth partition from the default of "ext3" to "xfs" to avoid this problem. A 1-hour HD recording is ~6GB and my front-panel disk I/O light would go on solid for 4-6 seconds during a delete of one of these files. With XFS the file is deleted in a fraction of the time and without nailing the drive with so much activity.

If you're still I/O bound, here's another idea that might help (can't guarantee it): Migrate to two drives. Assuming you are using IDE, not SATA, the setup would look like this:

1. Attach the first drive as the primary/Master and use it to hold everything except your recordings.

2. Attach the second drive to your secondary/Master and use it to hold only your recordings ("/myth/tv")

3. My guess is that you're optical drive is not used frequently. Probably best to make it your primary/slave so that when it is in use it won't slow down the disk drive that is used for recordings.

With this approach I believe your system will be able to perform concurrent I/O to your mysql database and your recording area.


Marc


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PostPosted: Fri Feb 23, 2007 9:55 am 
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Location: Ft. Worth TX
marc.aronson wrote:
snaproll:

Quote:
The fact is that 'DMA on' hard drives should handle several HD streams, but it's capacity is swamped during a file delete.


I converted my /myth partition from the default of "ext3" to "xfs" to avoid this problem. A 1-hour HD recording is ~6GB and my front-panel disk I/O light would go on solid for 4-6 seconds during a delete of one of these files. With XFS the file is deleted in a fraction of the time and without nailing the drive with so much activity.

If you're still I/O bound, here's another idea that might help (can't guarantee it): Migrate to two drives. Assuming you are using IDE, not SATA, the setup would look like this:

1. Attach the first drive as the primary/Master and use it to hold everything except your recordings.

2. Attach the second drive to your secondary/Master and use it to hold only your recordings ("/myth/tv")

3. My guess is that you're optical drive is not used frequently. Probably best to make it your primary/slave so that when it is in use it won't slow down the disk drive that is used for recordings.

With this approach I believe your system will be able to perform concurrent I/O to your mysql database and your recording area.


Marc


Interesting. I have been an exponent of 'one big drive' 'cuz I don't see reason for two or more to be 'screaming their bearings out' 24/7 when most of that time is idle. (I had considered LVM and raid..) If two drives improves I/o, it's worth a shot, but I can't rig it quickly, the machine i use for HD has one drive bay , i would have to, as you suggested rig it in the optical drive bay.
Thanks for the suggestion of an experiment & I'll see if I can rig that up. :lol:

Now as to xfs, I couldn't find any way to do it on a clean auto-install on my last R5E50 setup... I couldn't even find another distro with a partitioning tool that did XFS- How'd you do it ?


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PostPosted: Fri Feb 23, 2007 11:00 am 
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Posts: 74
I have smooth HD playback with the setup in my sig, outputting 720p though. Also it worked fine with a A64 3000+ processor but I had to use libmpeg2 and one field with that proc.
R5E50 has an option to delete files slowly, I forget exactly where it is, I think in the general setup, and it might have been in earlier versions but I never noticed it until R5E50.

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PostPosted: Fri Feb 23, 2007 3:43 pm 
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Location: California
snaproll, I would defintely try xfs before going to multiple drives. I suspect this will solve your problem. There aren't any autoinstall options for XFS -- you'll need to do it yourself. Since I had a ton of recordings I didn't want to loose, and I had a spare drive 200GB drive, here is an outlined of what I did:

1. deleted enough recordings so that the entire /myth partion would fit into 200GB.

2. Installed the 200GB drive into my system and copied everything from /myth to the spare drive

3. deleted the /myth partition and re-created it with an XFS file system. [update] Actually, I just noticed I didn't delete anything. What I did was use mkfs.xfs with the "-f" option, which forces it to destroy the existing filesystem and create a new one in XFS format.

4. copied back /myth from the spare drive to the main drive.

A more detailed description of what I did can be found in this thread: http://mysettopbox.tv/phpBB2/viewtopic. ... hlight=xfs


There is also a wiki article on switching to XFS at http://www.knoppmythwiki.org/index.php? ... tem+switch -- you may also find that helpful.


Marc


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PostPosted: Fri Feb 23, 2007 5:31 pm 
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Hi all,

I have changed the /myth partition from ext3 to xfs. I have also made sure that the HD is optimized and using DMA. I used this line from knoppmythwiki:

# enable DMA
/sbin/hdparm -qd1c1u1m16 /dev/hda

I have tried so many things to try to get 1080i playback smooth, but on first glance it seems ok. However, my wife HATES the mythbox because of these glitches and I have to admit that once someone points them out to you, you start to notice them and they are REALLY annoying.

Thanks,
Rick


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PostPosted: Fri Feb 23, 2007 6:34 pm 
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Location: California
Rick:

I doubt your problem has anything to do with disk I/O. I currently use R5D1 and Nvida driver 8774 with an FX-6200 card, but I drive my display at 720p. On R5A30.2 I was driving my display at 1080i for 1080i recordings and 720p for 720p recordings. I don't have a definitive answer for your problem, but here are some of the experiments I would try if I were having this problem:

1. HD transmissions come in two flavors: 1080i and 720p. Are you having the problem with both? I'm wondering if the problem is only happening on the playback of 720p recording on a 1080i display? I've never tried doing this, but I would think it would be problematic. Fox and ABC transmit 720p; ABC & NBC transmit 1080i.

2. Along the same lines as # 1 -- how do standard defintion, 480 interlaced recordings look?

3. Make sure that you don't have any deinterlacing options turned on. This would not be a good thing for the display of interlaced recordings on an interlaced display.

4. Can your TV deal with 720P? If so, then try creating a 720p modeline for your display. I use standard XVMC, bob2x deinterlace and it works perfectly. I've found that using the bob2x deinterlace option when playing back 720p recordings doesn't cause any visual degradation of the image, so I just leave deinterlace on 100% of the time.


5. Other settings I have in playback setup:
- Open GL vertical sync -- off. Bad results when it's on.
- Enable extra audio buffers
- Overscan / underscan set at 0

I realize that none of this is a definitive answer, but perhaps we can find something that will get us there through these experiments...

Marc


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PostPosted: Fri Feb 23, 2007 6:56 pm 
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Old TVs like his (and mine) don't accept 720p, only 1080i or 540p. He mentioned he wasn't able to get 540p working but didn't say what didn't work. I think that's his best bet for getting things going...


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